Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and one of the many digital tools that exist in the internet. It is a global collaborative effort, that is rooted in providing access to information to peoples across the world, in a variety of languages.

These two articles address an issue that is prevalent in Wikipedia: the gender disparity among “Wikipedians” and Wikipedia Editors. Khanna points out that during a survey conducted on December 2011, it was reported that 90% of the editors in Wikipedia are male, 9% are female, and 1% are transexual/transgender (N=6503). But, at the same time, the article points out that “Among editors who had joined in 2011, 14 percent were female compared to 10 percent for 2010, 9 percent for 2009 and 8 percent for editors who had joined in 2008 and participated in this survey. Possible explanations include that Wikipedia has been attracting a higher ratio of women recently, or that female editors leave the project sooner.” Meaning that there was a small increase of women that were joining Wikipedia as new editors, compared to previous years.

• How can we, as community members and scholars in training, continue to diversify and expand our contributions to educational platforms like Wikipedia?

FemTechNet offers one approach: Using Wikipedia as a pedagogical tool and as as a medium for teaching about Feminism and technology. The article by FemTechNet offers us an opportunity to reflect on how educators can use Wikipedia to engage students in democratizing knowledge production, editing articles, and to work in a collaborative environment that fosters research and writing. The “magic” of Wikipedia is that you can find literally any article on any subject matter, and you have the opportunity to create new content. It can be used in multiple subjects, from the Bench Sciences, to the Humanities. The major contribution of this piece is to provide an opportunity to address gender bias in Wikipedia, and to think about strategies and pedagogical approaches that can be incorporated in the classroom and in community spaces to edit and contribute to the platform.

One project that uses Wikipedia to address these gender biases is Art+Feminism (https://www.artandfeminism.org), specifically in the arts. This initiative is now expanding to other demographic groups, such as inviting and promoting organizing among new Latinx editors in Wikipedia.

• What projects or initiatives do you know are doing similar efforts with Wikipedia or in other platforms to address these issues?
• What other approaches can we as educators use in our classrooms and in our communities that can help address gender, racial, ethnic biases in technology?

“The traditional system of scholarly communication is outmoded, expensive, and suboptimal. And, exploitative too!” (Cirasella)

“As enrollment pressures and funding shortcomings continue to shape higher education decision making, many schools switch to OERs. Clearly, free is cheaper than alternatives. Clearly, more students, especially low-socioeconomic-status ones, will be better able to afford a textbook and even education in general. But are OERs as good as traditional, albeit costly, resources? It is too early to tell from the research so far.” (Gurung)

For this set of readings, the authors provide a detailed account of what is Open Access, and what are the current debates revolving around OA (in academic publishing, academic institutions, libraries, and other professional organizations). Cirasella begins by highlighting the exploitative relationship in academic publishing, particularly by describing the labor process behind it: beginning with the research conducted by scientists whom are sponsored by government or university funds (either in state-funded institutions or with government-sponsored grants – such as NSF/NIH/NEH), which then their research is published on scholarly journals (which in many cases are owned by for-profit companies). Finally, the universities need to pay the publisher in order to grant access to the articles and scientific production that was created with government-sponsored funds. In other words, this is a cycle that, not only is exploitative to those that conduct the labor, but at the same time restricts the access to the scientific production that was conducted, in many cases, by government and tax payer sponsored funds. She continues to elaborate and describe the labor process: a system that is rooted in inequality, exploitation, and extraction through free labor, “peer-reviewing” (a.k.a. “service to the profession”), which concludes with the researchers surrendering their copyrights to the publishers. This also is extremely costly for libraries whose budgets have shrunk in the last decade, meanwhile the costs to gain access to the databases have increased. Cirasella proposes Open Access as a solution: accessible at no-cost, increase in accessibility, institutional savings in the long-term, and broader access to knowledge production.

All this conversation on Open Access reminded me of the decision made by the University of California last year, in which the institution cancelled its contract with Elsevier https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/03/01/university-california-cancels-deal-elsevier-after-months-negotiations
This sends a political message to the for-profit academic publishing industry, but as the article mentioned, this doesn’t undermine their power.

Having stated this, how can we continue to push this conversation when profit-driven systems (such as the corporate university) are part of the institutional exploitation (i.e. adjunct labor, underfunded laboratories, underfunded doctoral students)? What other spaces can we foster in order to publish academic scholarship that don’t necessarily rely on the traditional academic journal? Can OA Journals become a solution to this issue, or are they just one alternative in this profit-driven system? How are some of the “Open access myths” (Suber) still undermining the mission of this publishing system?